


To a Perpetual End

by tendency



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben Solo Lives, F/M, POV Poe Dameron, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:35:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23854714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tendency/pseuds/tendency
Summary: Once in a while, Poe thinks about shooting Kylo Ren. Even worse, he's pretty sure that whatever Rey thinks about Kylo Ren, it definitely doesn't involve shooting him. (They may be working together now, but that doesn't mean Poe has to be happy about it.)
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 20
Kudos: 78
Collections: May the 4th Be With You Star Wars Fanworks Exchange 2020





	To a Perpetual End

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucymonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/gifts).



Their destination was supposedly a First Order base, supposedly abandoned, and supposedly easy to get into, but Poe was starting to have his doubts about every single one of those things. He glared up at the edifice, high up on the ridge above them with the pink sun glinting off of its few windows. "Why didn't we land up there?" he asked.

His current least favorite person and ostensible ally seemed to be expecting the question. "We might have been seen," said Kylo Ren or whatever he was calling himself now.

"By someone in the base you insisted is empty? Or by the base itself, which has somehow achieved sentience?"

"I said I _think_ it's empty. Oddly enough, I haven't had much chance to access First Order intelligence in the last seventy-two hours."

Ahead of them, Finn and Rey had already started clambering up the boulders that made up most of the slope up to the First Order base. "We haven't got all day!" Rey called back to them.

"You first," Poe said. "I want you where I can keep an eye on you."

"Whatever you want," Kylo replied. "But if you slip, I hope you realize it'll be much less likely for someone to catch you with the Force if both Rey and I are in front of you looking the other direction."

Poe shrugged. "I'm sure Rey's a good enough Jedi to catch me anyway. Just make sure that if _you_ slip, you catch yourself with the Force before you land on me."

Kylo looked annoyed. "I won't slip," he said, and jumped five meters straight up in the air, landing—with a brief scrabble for a handhold, Poe was happy to notice—on the rock next to Rey.

Poe shook his head and found a grip on a boulder a bit closer to the ground. Whenever he'd imagined a victorious Resistance dismantling the First Order, it had looked nothing like this. (And he had imagined it, once in a while; it was a very relaxing activity.) For one thing, his envisionings had involved Kylo Ren being dead in as bloody a fashion as possible, not showing up at their main base in a scout-class TIE fighter, with Rey chirping about how he'd turned and was a good guy now and all that.

If it had been anybody but Rey making those claims, Poe probably would have shot Kylo on the spot. (If it had been anybody but Rey, there probably would have been a line to shoot him.) But Rey had told them about the Emperor who had been alive and now was dead again, and how Kylo had saved her life. Then Lieutenant Connix had suggested that he prove himself by helping to bring down what remained of the First Order, and one thing had led to another until Poe was here, following the other members of their four-person invasion team up a steep rocky hillside to an unfamiliar building.

Poe caught up with Finn halfway up the hill, but the two Force users—with the unfair advantage of being able to climb several meters in a single bound—retained their lead for the entire ascent. When Finn and Poe finally reached the top of the ridge, Rey and Kylo were already there, waiting quietly near the edge. As was usual for them over the last few days, they were standing quite close to each other. Too close, if Poe had anything to say about it; but then, he figured a safe distance from Kylo Ren ought to be measured in parsecs rather than meters.

Poe stepped forward and pushed his way in between them, because why not? "So are we going to break into this empty base or just stand around all day?" he asked.

"I thought you wanted us to wait for you," Rey said.

"Yeah, well, we're here now. So?"

"Ben?" Rey said, turning to Kylo.

"The codes should give us access without any trouble, but we'll need to be ready for anything that might be inside," Kylo said. "I don't sense any life forms, but a base like this would have been assigned a full complement of droids, and we don't know if they've been activated by the vestiges of the First Order or not."

"What about you, Rey," Poe asked, "do you sense any life forms?"

She shook her head. "I don't, either. But I agree we should be ready for droids."

"So are we ready to go, then," Finn asked from behind Poe, "or are we going to stand around all day until somebody starts shooting at us?"

Kylo nodded abruptly. He unhooked his lightsaber—the new one that Rey had given him, which was _another_ thing that Poe wasn't a fan of—from his belt and held it unactivated but ready. "Let's go," he said.

"Okay," Poe said, and drew his blaster.

As promised, Kylo was able to unlock the doors and get them inside, while around them the base remained silent. Silence was good: it meant no attackers, it boded well for a quick easy mission, and it made it easier for Poe to pretend he wasn't working with who he was working with. The four of them crept down the first long hallway, weapons at the ready, but there was nothing to break the stillness. The door ahead of them slid open after Kylo keyed in a few more codes, and once more they crept silently but safely down a long corridor.

Perhaps they'd been right and this base was abandoned, after all. In the lead, both Kylo and Rey seemed to reach this same conclusion. Their shoulders both relaxed in the same moment, almost as if they were thinking in unison. Following their lead, Poe stopped holding his blaster up and held it more loosely at hip height, to save strain on his arms. Rey half turned, started to say "I think—"

And so of course that was when an alarm finally sounded.

"It's not my fault!" Kylo yelped. All four of them jumped to the sides of the corridor—Rey and Kylo against a sealed doorway on the northwest side, Finn and Poe behind a computer terminal on the southeast side—but neither location afforded much cover. And as the alarm continued, there was a rushing sound: something, or rather many somethings, moving quickly in their direction.

"It's got to be droids, right?" Rey snapped. She ignited her lightsaber and Kylo followed suit. "I don't think I sense any life forms."

"Are you asking us?" Finn replied. "Because I thought you were supposed to be the one to tell us these things."

"It's definitely droids," Kylo said.

"What, you can sense them now? Because a minute ago you said—"

Kylo waved his lightsaber vaguely in the direction they'd come. "See? Droids."

Poe spun on his heel. "Yeah, those are definitely droids," he said as he started shooting. "Droids with really big blasters," he added, though he doubted anybody was paying attention. "They must not have gotten the message that this base was supposed to be abandoned."

He was kneeling behind the terminal by this point, shooting over the top of it. Finn was next to him, leaning around the side. There was a hum of lightsabers behind them from Kylo and Rey in their doorway doing Jedi things; every so often a blaster bolt came from their direction, but Poe was too busy looking (and shooting) in the other direction to figure out whether one of them had gotten a blaster from somewhere or whether they were just deflecting the droids' blaster fire with their lightsabers.

Even as the drowned droids piled up in the hallway, more came up behind them to take their place. They moved slower through the tangle of droid parts, but it didn't stop them. Blaster fire did, though. Whatever these droids' previous role had been, it hadn't required them to be armored at all. So far, few had need more than one shot to take them down, and none of them had gotten within three meters of Poe and Finn's computer terminal, though Poe wasn't sure how long that luck would hold.

"How many of these droids do they have?" Finn yelled, without pausing shooting.

"Too many," Poe yelled back. Blaster bolts were still coming fast and furious from ahead of them—but, he suddenly realized, none from behind them, and no sound of lightsabers either. "Where'd the others go?"

"Who—oh, Rey and her new buddy? I think they stabbed the door open and went wherever it leads."

"And left us with a hallway full of angry droids? I bet that was _his_ idea."

Finn frowned. "No, I think they're actually doing something useful. It's just a feeling, but besides, I trust Rey."

"Well I hope they hurry up, whatever it is."

Ten more droids joined the pile in front of them, and still there was no respite. The pile was smoldering now—whether sparked by their blaster fire or by a short in one of the destroyed droids, Poe didn't know and didn't care. Each droid now had to push its predecessors aside before it could climb through the pile, which provided plenty of time to shoot them down in turn. But with the other end of the hallway still leading to an unknown destination, and now the doorway behind them also gaping open, Poe didn't feel like he'd be relaxing any time soon.

And then, finally, Rey and Kylo reappeared. Or at least, their lightsabers did, spinning in from behind the crowd of droids and making short work of all of them. As droids fell, mostly cut in half, Poe could finally see the two Force users standing behind them, hands outstretched for their lightsabers that were already coming back to them—

And then half of the ceiling caved in, destabilized by the burning droid pile. "Was that supposed to happen?" Poe yelled.

If there was a reply, he couldn't hear it through the debris that now sealed the hallway. All he heard was the sound of falling metal and sparking droid parts.

With a sigh, Finn shot the one almost-whole droid that remained on their side of the blockage. "What do you want to do now?" he asked.

"We'll give them five minutes to rendezvous back here," Poe decided. "Then we'll go looking for them. But for now we should stay somewhere that we know we have cover in case there's more droids out there that we haven't spotted yet."

"Sounds good," Finn said. He sat down and leaned against the hallway wall, blaster across his knees. "So."

"So?"

"So are we going to talk about how Rey is suddenly best friends with the guy who tortured you and killed a lot of people?"

"No...no, we're not going to talk about that, I'm much happier not talking about it."

"Yeah, I can tell, you're very happy," Finn said. "But seriously, we've been stuck in the same ship with them for the last few days with next to no privacy; this seems as good a time as any to discuss the situation."

"What situation? The way Rey keeps looking him like he's not completely awful? The way if you get one of them alone in a room for a private conversation, five seconds later the other one wanders in? The way they claim they're stuck together because something-something-mystical-Force-dyad-something-destiny? The way—" He broke off, reconsidered, and then forged ahead. "I went to get something out of the galley yesterday and they were standing _right_ next to each other. Maybe they were just communing with the Force, but if I had to guess, I'd say they'd been kissing a moment before I walked in."

Finn grimaced. "I wish I could say that was surprising," he said.

"Yeah, I do too," Poe said. "So you've seen it too?"

"No kissing, but I've just been getting a feeling that they don't mind spending time with each other."

"Everyone in the galaxy to pick from," Poe said, "and she mystical Force destinies herself to _that_."

"I don't think it's Rey's fault," Finn said. "She probably didn't get much of a choice about having a mystical Force bond in the first place, much less who it was to."

"Yeah, but she has a choice about kissing him."

They both glared at the smoldering ruins of the blocked hallway. "Do you suppose..." Finn muttered after a moment.

"...that she's kissing him right now?" Poe stood up. "They'd better not be. They're supposed to be taking down droids."

Finn stood up and checked his blaster. "To be fair, we haven't taken down any droids in the last five minutes either. Should we head through the door they went through or check out the other end of the hallway?"

"Door, I think. Figure out where they've got to before we explore more of the unknown."

They brought their blasters to the ready and stepped through the doorway. The room on the other side was large and empty, all signs of its former purpose lost to time. The only light was at the far end, on the hallway side beyond the blockage, where another lightsaber-created hole showed where Rey and Kylo's path had led. Finn and Poe headed in their wake, but before they were halfway across the room, the light was blocked by someone or something coming back towards them.

There was no cover, but Poe and Finn dodged apart and dove to the ground, ready to shoot. "It's just us!" Rey called, and for a moment Poe wished she'd been a little slower so he could have 'accidentally' shot her new best friend. But he probably would have missed in the dark, or just had the bolt deflected by lightsaber, or even shot Rey on actually-regrettable accident, so it was probably for the best that he hadn't. "We got rid of the rest of the droids," Rey added. "It looks like whoever abandoned this base didn't think the First Order would ever reclaim it, so they wired a booby-trap protocol into the door and left the droids in limited standby mode until our arrival woke them up."

"You figured all that out in five minutes?" Poe asked. He decided not to add 'or were you making out in a corner and just making an educated guess about the droids,' but he figured it was probably implied as subtext.

"No, we were hunting droids for most of it," Rey said.

"And then we looked it up," Kylo added. "Don't forget, we do have access to all of the base's computers."

"Yeah, that's about the only thing I've seen you be useful for so far," Poe said. "Getting us into the facility doesn't count because of the whole droids-shooting-at-us thing."

"So if we're done with all the unexpected stuff," Finn said, "can we get back to the retrieval that we actually came here for?"

"We looked that up too," Rey said. "We were headed the right way; it's just at the end of the hallway out there."

"Glad that worked out," Poe said. He squinted across the dark room. "Are you holding hands?"

There was a suspicious pause—long enough for a held hand to be quickly dropped—and then they said "No" in unison.

"Glad to hear it," Poe said. "Let's go get this data chip before any more droids show up. So we can get out of here and blow the place up and get back on the ship and do it all over again."

"Yes, let's," Rey said. She led the way out of the darkened room and down the hallway.

Poe was pretty sure that she was having the best time of the four of them. Following behind her, Poe and Finn glared at Kylo and Kylo tried to pretend he didn't notice them looking at him even though it was obvious that he did.

Poe rolled his eyes and decided to add in a blaster accident for Kylo Ren to the next time he imagined the victorious Resistance dismantling the First Order. But in real life, he suspected that the only thing such an accident (well, 'accident') would achieve would be to make Rey sad and annoyed. He sighed. This was going to be a long few weeks.


End file.
